Hot PXL updated hands-on

We peel back the streetwise veneer to find a bunch of extremely playable microgames

It's not every day that you get to meet the main character of a video game, let alone get to watch him drunkenly undulate on a stripper pole in a Las Vegas hotel suite. But such was GamesRadar's introduction to lanky French madman Jonathan Choquel - better known as "Djon" - who pulls double duty as the creative director and star of Hot PXL.

When we met Djon (during an Atari event, if you were curious about the stripper pole), he was pretty enthusiastic about his collection of microgames, which he says will "break the barriers between audio, video and gaming." Far from being just another WarioWare clone, he told us, Hot PXL will be all about expandability, enabling players to store and arrange music (using iTunes-style software), download new minigames (some 50 will be available at the game's launch, with more planned) and get passwords to download special podcasts as they unlock each of the game's chapters. (For a preview of what to expect, you can see some of Djon's podcasts here.)

Of course, all that stuff is needless bells and whistles if you don't have a good game at the center of it. The good news is that the gameplay itself hasn't fallen by the wayside. Like WarioWare, Hot PXL is at heart a collection of rapid-fire "microgames" - most only a few seconds long - that have players racing the clock to do stuff like eat burgers, scratch records or suck up colored pixels. And while some were a little hard to figure out, most were nonetheless pretty entertaining.